Software, weather, and politics, among other things.

Monthly Archives: October 2006

I’m selling off a few items to make some room and make some cash. I haven’t set the final list of items yet, but this stuff is definitely going:

My little Pentium III 2U rackmount server. It’s sitting under my bed, with no real use for it at this point as virtual machines have largely replaced it. It’s got an 800 MHz Pentium III processor, 192 MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, and runs Linux beautifully. It’s a good first server for those who are wanting to learn some stuff or perhaps have a machine to test stuff out on. I’ve run Apache, PHP, and MySQL on it with no problems. It’s not ready for a production environment but it does a great job for those just getting started or need a test box. I’ll sell it without the operating system so you can put what you like on it. I’m thinking about $135 or so for it.

A 15″ CRT monitor. It’s a decent little monitor; it has its issues but still works fine. I’ll sell that for about $25 or so.

A 17″ Compaq CRT monitor. It’s a smidgen dark but looks quite gorgeous at 1024×768. I’ll be asking for about $40 or your best offer.

If you’re interested, please leave a note in comments. All reasonable offers accepted! At this time, please only folks within a reasonable radius of the Charleston area.

If Democrats wish to win the hearts and minds of the populace, they just don’t make statements like this, mangled or otherwise. This is the kind of stuff Karl Rove seizes on…not a good strategic move by Kerry, not at all…

One more hour to sleep/party, depending on what you are doing tonight in celebration of Halloween. I’m somewhat relieved that I don’t have to hang decorations around JaredWSmith.com for its color scheme is Halloween year-round. ;)

…that Jeff Weaver, left for dead by the Angels in the middle of the season and traded to the Cardinals to promote younger brother Jered, would have thrown the game of his life in the clinching game of the World Series. Unbelievable.

Yep, the St. Louis Cardinals are 2006’s World Series champions. Congrats to them — they put together a hell of a run. Nice to see the National League get a little respect. I was certain that the Tigers were going to pull it off, but their pitching did them in — not so much with the pitches they threw, but with the errors they made. That will go down as the legacy of the 2006 Tigers, and that’s a real shame — they were a great story. But the Cardinals made fewer mistakes, hit the ball better, and put together a string of unbelievable pitching performances from totally unlikely heroes. My hat’s off to them.

Wow, today is depressing outside. The rain is steady and kinda cold, and it’s just miserable outside today. I’ve got some ponding in front of my house to boot. :( I couldn’t find my umbrella to save my life, and of course the sky opened up on me. I eventually did find it — sitting uselessly next to my desk in my cube. Ugh.

So this is a continuation of my 3am post, and also of what I was working on yesterday. Continue reading →

So I had a giant blog post written on my PC at work…and I kinda forgot about it. My bad. It wasn’t that great, anyway.

I’m drowning in a sea of work, but I’ll use this moment to come up for air to comment on a couple things, real fast:

Windows Vista is close to RTM, but I have to say, Fedora Core 6‘s desktop composition and display (courtesy of AIGLX and the Compiz window manager) is far more attractive — and much friendlier to older machines — than anything Microsoft could ever offer with Aero. Think Linux is stagnating on the desktop? Think again. I’m not a big fan of Fedora, but I may have to give Core 6 a whirl on my PC soon (in place of Vista RC2 probably) to see how well things are coming along on that side of the fence. It’s been a couple years since I ran a Linux desktop on a regular basis, and it’s high time I gave it a whirl again.

Bruce Bochy is leaving the Padres, heading up I-5 to the Bay Area to manage the San Francisco Giants. And so the Sandy Alderson era begins in force — I don’t think Kevin Towers is going to be too far behind at this rate. Bochy’s tenure with the team, dating back 24 years including when he was the team’s catcher, is pretty unheard of in this day and age. (I have the San Diego Padres’ 1984 World Series pennant, with his name on it.) He’ll be missed, and at a time when the Padres are starting to win consistently, I have to wonder if a new manager is going to help or hinder progress. Time will tell on that one. The early short list I hear is Bud Black, among others. I personally want Joe Girardi, but he’s going to be a YES broadcaster next year it looks like.

That’s it for now. I had a thousand other items at my other desk that I won’t see again until about 1pm tomorrow, so those will get posted whenever I get a free second. Gonna probably hop in the shower now, hit the sack for an hour or two, and then head on to my 8am for the presentation we’re doing. What a marathon life I’ve been leading.

Yes, as I think I alluded to last week (don’t quite remember — it’s a tad late), I’ve decided to place Google ads on my site to at least do a little something with keeping the hosting paid for. I’m not sure I’m sold on them yet, but we’ll see.

So that’s the story with those — it’s just another way for me to raise a little bit of funds as I am, after all, a starving college student. :)

Mozilla has released Firefox 2 — go get it! If you’re running Firefox 2 RC3 (like I am), you’re running the final release already, it appears, as the build tag between the “official” Firefox 2 and RC3 hasn’t changed (both were built on the 10th of October).

It works unexpectedly well with my extensions, has a nicely revised tab interface, and the session management features, which kick in when restarting Firefox due to adding extensions or in the event of a crash, are to die for — no more having to re-find all those pages you were on, they’ll just come right back up. Kudos to the Firefox team for a strong evolutionary release of the browser.